


Stitches

by pr0nz69



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Broken Families, Familial Abuse, Gen, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Sewing, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25741144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr0nz69/pseuds/pr0nz69
Summary: Emile’s fingers are like wisteria blooms, long and trailing and white-purple with bruises. Mercedes watches them as they fumble over tangles of bright red string, trying to thread a needle. She reaches out, brushing his hands, and he jerks them back like her touch is fire.“I can do it myself,” he mumbles.She blushes.———Emile is falling apart at the seams. All Mercedes can do is try to stitch him back together.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	Stitches

**Author's Note:**

> My piece for _Angel of Death_ , the Jeritza fanzine! I love smol, soft, sad Emile and Mercie so much.

Emile’s fingers are like wisteria blooms, long and trailing and white-purple with bruises. Mercedes watches them as they fumble over tangles of bright red string, trying to thread a needle. She reaches out, brushing his hands, and he jerks them back like her touch is fire.

“I can do it myself,” he mumbles.

She blushes.

Mother looks up from her mending (that’s all she does now when they sew together—mends Emile’s clothes) and reproaches, “Let your brother do it himself.” She doesn’t mention the wisteria-bruises. She never does.

“I’m sorry,” Mercedes whispers.

They fall to silence. Mercedes passes her needle through her bear’s ear. Tugs the string. Pushes the needle back through. A stitch to hold it together.

Emile’s still struggling with the thread. His brows are furrowed, the creases between them angry. His teeth start to show, glints of hard white between bitten lips. The pads of his fingers are red with pinpricks.

Mercedes can’t take it anymore.

“If you cut it diagonally,” she says, demonstrating with her own scissors and thread, “it’s much easier to thread it. See?”

Emile looks up and then away, and that’s when Mercedes realizes he’s only a few blinks away from tears. With an unsteady hand, he picks up his scissors and snips the thread.

“That’s it,” she encourages, her throat tight.

The thread flows like blood over his hands as he funnels it through the eye of the needle. His fingers are clumsy when they tie the knot, but he does it. His shoulders fall as if cut free from a marionette’s strings—red like his thread—but Mercedes knows he’s still suspended, still bound, because the strings are visible to all three of them and nobody will try to sever them.

She stabs her bear’s head where it’s open at the top because she can save this ugly, deflated thing, can keep all its brains and blood and sanity from leaking out, but she can’t save Emile. She pulls the thread taut, another stitch.

Mother begins to speak. Small talk. She dances around the subject of Stepfather like a prima ballerina at the Mittelfrank Opera Company. Like the wisteria-bruises, Stepfather is a taboo. Mercedes is old enough to know why; she has no soft feelings for the man.

When Emile’s needlework gets aggressive—when poking becomes stabbing—Mother talks louder. She means to drown out his silence—or maybe the anger that lives and bleeds in his every action. Mercedes keeps stitching, stitching, stitching, but she can’t outpace the elephant sitting heavy in their midst.

She notices when Emile’s fingers slow and still just like she notices everything unspoken about him. Mother doesn’t see it. Mother is still prattling on, starving herself of air so that she doesn’t have to breathe or think. Emile is staring at his sewing, hands gripping the fabric but unmoving, the needle stuck partway through and left abandoned. His eyes fog, tracking slowly, seeming to follow nothing at all. His face is ash-white, and he looks, Mercedes thinks, like a creature out of one of her ghost stories.

“Emile,” she whispers, “are you okay?”

This isn’t one of her silly stories.

Mother stops talking. Emile turns his head slowly, a doll with a shattered neck joint. His eyes don’t see her, but Mercedes isn’t looking at them anymore. A line of red streaks from his golden head down the back of his neck. For several seconds, she wonders—really, truly wonders—how his thread got all the way back there. It’s her last line of defense against a truth so grotesque that she’s dirtied her own hands just to bury it out of sight.

She folds those hands over her mouth to stifle a scream that doesn’t come—and smells on her skin the iron tang of blood that isn’t hers.

Mother sees, finally, and flings her sewing aside. She’s screaming as she grabs Emile’s head, but Mercedes can’t make out the words. The air’s too heavy— _suffocating_ —and she can’t move her legs, her lungs. Her fingers, pinched around her needle, tremble. The blood flows loose around Mother’s fingers, winding like those puppet strings, finally cut, and now Emile is screaming, too.

“ _Don’t touch it_ , _don’t touch it_ , _don’t touch it_!”

Mother does touch it, touches it all over, pulling her kerchief from her head in a moment of clarity and pressing it to the wound. Emile fights her, pushing and pinching and shrieking for her not to touch it.

“What is this wound?” she demands, almost like she doesn’t know, like she’s never suspected. “Who did this?” But she’s known all along.

“Nothing!” Emile sobs. “It’s nothing! Don’t tell!”

Don’t tell. He never did. Mother never did.

Mercedes knew. And she never did. She yanks her thread through her bear. A stitch to keep her together, but the force of her thrust snaps it apart.

“We need to go,” Mother’s saying. She has Emile pulled against her, his bloodstained hair printing shadows on her frock. “We need to go, we need to go…”

They don’t leave until later, weeks later. They don’t take Emile, and Mother comes apart at the seams. Mercedes can’t stitch her together again.

No matter how hard she tries, she can’t stitch any of them back together again.


End file.
